- Make the audience terribly sad. The easy way to do this is to take two seconds to establish a character, and then kill ’em. Even if you have to play the same two bars of sad music on the piano over and over for an eternity, you must force the audience to cry.
- Find something that obviously does not have consciousness and give it consciousness so the kiddies will have guilt whenever they don’t show it proper care. Should they ever mistreat a toy, bug, fish, rat, or car, all of which are apparently people too, they will be hurting a conscious creature, and their guilt will remind them of your film, so they will always think about it and buy the merchandise. Nothing’s too ridiculous – PIXAR’s beloved mascot is a conscious desk lamp. So remember, kids: that toy felt pain, that bug had a life, that monster under your bed needs your help to survive, and that bear is your mom.
- Have two or more characters argue with each other. Forget the fact that arguments are some of the most annoying experiences in life – the audience won’t see it as annoying. They’ll see it as either great comedy or great drama no matter how pointless the argument is.
- Throw in some pointless physical comedy. Did you ever see the Mr. Bean cartoon based on the Rowan Atkinson character? No, nobody did, because it wasn’t funny. The physical comedy had no effect because the cartoon wasn’t physical, it was animated. The audience somehow won’t notice the same problem in your PIXAR movie, so with the right score you can work that physical comedy whenever you need a laugh.
- Add a character who can’t get a simple idea through his/her head. He/she can continually forget the whole friggin’ plot, or ignore the fact that he/she is a toy/animal/vehicle/whatever, or simply not notice that nobody likes him/her. The only thing that matters is setting up a chance for another character to force your ignorant character to come to grips with reality, which will lead to more sadness and drama.
- Shock ’em with a big reveal about the villain that’s really kinda obvious. You know that explorer/pilot that the protagonist always adored so much? He’s actually the villain! You know that teddy bear who shockingly turned out to actually be the villain? He’s gonna start being nice now… no, wait, he’s still the villain! They’ll never see it coming if they’re in your target demographic of six-year-olds.
- I must reiterate the first point about making the audience cry. You have to do this a few times because everything seems funnier if it’s pulling you out of a sad scene. Works like magic.
- All hope must be lost, and it must be really dramatic. All movies do this old trick, so you have to do it more to stand out. It doesn’t matter if it’s all no big deal in reality. You can make the audience believe that toys getting stuck on a plane to Japan is the worst thing that can happen to the universe. A fictitious French restaurant getting a bad review can be a terrifying thought, and a town on Route 66 getting closed down because hardly anybody lives there can be a travesty. There are no molehills; there are only volcanoes erupting on top of your audience.
- Wrap everything up with a precious moment that’s so dang heartwarming they’ll get heartburn. Use the old Three-Second Test: if the ‘awww’s of the teenage girls in the audience continue for three seconds or longer, you’ve done your job. A great way to do this kind of scene is having some characters who’ve moved apart, if only emotionally, reunite. If that’s not strong enough, have one of them quote something the other said earlier in the film/franchise, perhaps (but not necessarily) slightly adjusting it to make it even nicer and more precious. Any crap about the importance of friendship is good too. Actually, on second thought, put these throughout the film any little chance you get. These are the moments PIXAR is all about.
- You now have a hit movie that’ll make lots and Lotso money (see what I did there?) and now you just need to do it over and over again for the sequels! Happy franchise-building!
Blog Posts
The Parable of the Desert Orange
Two explorers, an atheist and a theist, were out in the middle of the desert. They happened to come across an orange sitting in the sand with nothing else around. They found it very strange for an orange to be in the middle of nowhere, and the theist remarked, “You know, this exemplifies how my way of thinking is more logical than yours.”
“Oh?” the atheist replied. “And just how is that?”
“You see, the logical mind observes this fruit, which has no apparent reason for being in this foreign place, and concludes that someone must have put it here. One cannot assume that it appeared here randomly, so the obvious alternative is that someone meant for it to be here. The same can be said of the universe, although you deny such intuitive logic.”
“Ah,” said the atheist, “quite contrarily, this is a perfect example of how my way of thinking is rational, whereas your religious mindset is intrinsically silly. When I see this fruit, I wonder what logical series of events could have led to its arrival here. Even if I cannot think of a perfect explanation, I will not just assume that it appeared here as the result of magic, which I likewise do not assume about the universe.”
The two bickered about the analogy for some time, arguing that the other’s rhetoric was twisting the truth. Then, out of curiosity, they decided to examine the orange for fingerprints. They wiped the sand off the orange and held it under a magnifying glass, turning it slowly.
“I clearly see prints on both sides,” said the theist.
“Actually,” the atheist rebutted, “the prints you see on one side appear to be from an animal, and the prints on the other are probably your own. It seems just as probable then, if not more so, that this was carried here by natural means, not by any person.”
The two then argued for hours about what they were really seeing, and eventually they gave up on the mysterious desert orange, but only after the magnifying glass had completely scorched it.
Hello World!
Yes, I actually am keeping the “Hello World!” post and editing it rather than deleting it.
This website was purchased shortly after someone speaking at my college (HCC, in August of 2014) told us students that we all ought to buy ourselves domain names, our names specifically. While I have been building the website with the intention of using as a professional website for myself, to put up demos of my work and promote myself and such, I decided it would be good for me to have a blog where I could write articles/essays/pieces that are better suited for a personal website than a social media website. So if it is not relevant to MuppetHub.com, too long to be a post on Tumblr, or I have no better place to display it, it will probably end up on this little blog. I think I have tried to do a professional website or blog before, but it did not work well in the past as I was less experienced. Hopefully, this will be an opportunity for me to share my thoughts publicly and get good feedback in the best way possible.